“I guess I have buddies who date girls that age. But yeah, seems a little…stunted. Like, what do they even have in common?”
“Apart from the unshakable belief that he’s a demigod?” I cracked, and he guffawed. “Edie had mentioned in an email that her mom liked that dude. Which, you’d think a mother would be suspicious of a grown man interested in her postgrad daughter.”
“That so?”
No, it was a blatant lie. I had no idea how Mrs. Iredale felt about Greg. But I nodded.
“Well, I can’t imagine her mom had anything nice to say about me.”
This again. “Why do you say that?”
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“No, I’m curious! You said you didn’t like them.” It’s a long story, he’d said on the phone. And when I told him I had time: See, I kinda don’t.
“It’s just—we had a weird…incident.”
The waiter leaned in to refresh our water. Fuck.
“Why are we talking about this again?” Alex said in the ensuing silence.
“Alex, I want to tell you something.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I know about Lloyd.”
His eyes widened and I held my breath. If my gamble was wrong and Lloyd wasn’t the paramour Alex had been referring to…
“What?”
“I actually knew him.”
“You did ?”
“Yeah, I met him the same night Edie did. Well, the same night you and Edie met for the first time officially.”
“In the city?”
“Yeah, we ended up hanging out on a rooftop on Fourteenth.”
He squinted at me. “You were there?”
Ouch. “I was indeed!”
“Huh.” He leaned back and looked around suspiciously. “In my head it was her old roommate.”
“Which one?”
“I forget her name. She had the nose.” He outlined a bump over his own face. What a nice descriptor for him to use.
“Well, it was me,” I continued, “and I remember you bros seeming pretty tight, so I was really surprised he’d do that to you.”
“Oh, we stopped hanging out long before he and Edie started hooking up.”
Lucky break that he hadn’t asked how I’d found out about the affair. Men’s brains really do work differently—without the real-time social mapping, perhaps, the 3-D blueprints of relational information. “Right, you guys had a falling-out. Did he start hooking up with Edie as, like, a revenge thing?”
He snorted. “Revenge? We weren’t on a soap opera.” He shrugged. “It was just some dumb elementary-school shit. He borrowed my nicest guitar and fucked it up and refused to fix it. He was also this brilliant deadbeat who was too high and coked up to actually accomplish anything. We got into a stupid fight and I told him so. I used to have some anger issues.”
More wine appeared and we both waited through its uncorking. Another lucky break: He was still a fast drinker.
“Anger issues?” I asked finally, spinning the ruby liquid around in my glass.
“Dude, let’s stop talking about this. As we already established, we were stupid twenty-three-year-olds.” He scrunched up his mouth. “Actually, I think I was twenty-four.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” I picked up my fork again. “How did you find out? About Edie and Lloyd?”
“Come on, Lindsay.”
“I wanna know! You don’t think we always wondered why you guys broke up? You were so weirdly secretive about it!”
“Cool, so you guys were just talking about us all the time.”
We’d regressed; we were bitchy twentysomethings again.
“Well, I think it matters! We were worried about you two. And nobody would tell us what the fuck was going on.”
“Well, maybe it was nobody’s fucking business!”
“But it was! We were all in that apartment together—”
“You didn’t even live there!”
He’d struck a tuning fork and I let it ring out. The sting crept into my eyes and I willed them to fill with tears; one hard blink and a drop slipped down my cheek.
“Look, Lindsay, I—”
“No, it’s fine.” I smeared it with my palm.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just…not fun to talk about.”
Why, because you killed her? “I get it. It’s hard for me, too. Especially because we…she and I were fighting. So even up until the end, I didn’t have the warmest feelings.”
An endless second as I waited to see if he’d take the bait: Me too, it was so hard to go on living together…“Yeah, that sucks,” he said finally.
Ugh. “Sarah brought up how Edie was kind of…disengaging from everyone that summer,” I offered. Like you, you idiot. I caught you on film saying you wanted to slit her throat.
“I mean, we’d just broken up.”
“I know. That must have been so hard deciding to stay friends and roommates and everything.”